Re: Newbie problem running *.m files on Octave 3.4.2 on Snow Leopard

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2011/7/30 John Helly <address@hidden>:
> Thanks again. I'm trying to run this sample code I found just to see
> how/if Octave works before giving it something more complex that
> already runs in Matlab. The documentation suggests that all that is
> necessary is to invoke Octave with a file as an argument and it will
> run the file and exit. What happens is that the bottom window pops
> up as you surmized; no files are created. I added 'pause' at the end
> of the file and it had no effect.

Hm, this script is supposed to produce a graph indeed. It should also
produce some output, because the author forgot to add a few
semicolons. Your symptoms are strange, because (1) I can't see why the
"octave" command should be opening new terminals (2) the code indeed
is not getting executed at all, because you're not seeing the buggy
output. You should at least be able to type "bike_example" in the
interactive prompt and run this code.

Here's my next guess: whoever compiled that Octave version was trying
to be too helpful and actually made a shell script or binary that
introduces an additional step to open a terminal with Octave running
instead of just running Octave, presumably because Mac OS X users
would not be familiar with a purely CLI application. So what exactly
is getting executed when you type "octave"? Is it a shell script? A
binary? Type "which octave" to at least see which file it's running,
and type "file $(which octave)" to see what kind of file it is. It may
be a symbolic link, in which case keep following that symbolic link
until you figure out what is ultimately being run. If it is indeed a
binary and not an overzealously helpful script, I'm at a loss.

HTH,
- Jordi G. H.